PTSD is nothing to joke about if it’s real – and maybe having your software made obsolete time and time again doesn’t qualify. Yet the loss is still real, even if you’re too young to have experienced it, or too robust to care.

At 64 years old, wasting that kind of time is not a strategy for success.
Imagine how screwy it will be to find out at 71, when I retire, that everything I did since I was 64 is again throwaway, merely more abandonware.

Nope.

Time to do some research and calculations. Can I dodge this bullet?

Enter: Polymer

Like a shining light from the heavens, Polymer Project emerges, and offers a chance to write long-lived software that will deploy everywhere.

None of the abovePolymer’s primary objective is sometimes described as to not exist.
Somehow, somewhere, sometime, HTML/CSS/JS will be enough. We’re not there yet, but we’re inches away.
Yeah, it’s weird. #useThePlatform
Scratch head. Huh?

Components & pieces, not frameworksPolymer thinks in terms of Web Components, or pieces. Excepting for that minor issue of React eschewing standards in favor of proprietary code and API, it’s most like React, in that sense. Totally unlike Angular or other systems that provide everything, top down. In Web Components, you build in pieces, from bottom up.

Ultra-light
As with #2 above, Polymer shoots for a very small codebase, so that it downloads fast and works quickly. Again, compare to something like Angular which has to download the internet to your app, before your app starts working.

PWA
If you haven’t figured out that you can now code and deploy one version of software to the web, mobile, and desktop, I’m not going to convince you here, but you have some serious catching up to do, on the technology front.

Smart
I’ll take well designed software to overly clever software, any day.
Hang out on the polymer slack feed for a few years, if you want to see how really thoughtful people think a design through to completion.

For all of these reasons, plus a false sense of confidence that the Google Chrome team seems solidly behind it (google+, anyone?), I’m betting that Polymer/Lit has the greatest chance of not being obsolete by the time I learn it.